


Kindred Soul

by Filigree



Series: Empty House [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Recovery, can there be such a thing as dark fluff? Grieving, mascara alert, not beta-read because I am impatient and busy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 04:26:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigree/pseuds/Filigree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony sets a challenge from beyond the grave, and Loki begins to wake up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kindred Soul

“So, I’ve got this idea about magnetic induction, and I want to see if your mojo distorts the fields like I think it might…”

When Loki Silvertongue breathed in, he caught the scents of motor oil, metal dust, scorched cotton fabric, male human sweat, evaporating whisky, and expensive musk. For long, contented minutes, Loki listened to Tony Stark chatter about technology. Slowly, Loki realized none of this could possibly be real. Not the soft white leather of the big divan upon which they lounged, Tony curled warm against Loki’s left side, with Loki’s left arm slung around the Midgardian’s shoulder. Not the sweep of Midgardian steel and glass – Tony’s penthouse, in Tony’s ridiculous Tower – or the brilliant daytime cityscape outside. 

Loki had thrown Tony through that very window, there.

Banner’s green alter-ego had flattened Loki into the now-pristine tiled floor, there. 

On that spot next to it, Loki had once found himself chained and muzzled, sadly glared at by Thor. Speculatively watched by Iron Man, who still wore his battered red and gold armor, the metal panels still sparking from his heroic trip through a Chitauri wormhole. That tiny half-quirk of a smile had lingered in Loki’s memory for years…

On that patch of lush white carpet, Loki had viciously dropped the empty, cleaned, burned, and breached armor that had finally killed Tony Stark, years after the Battle of New York.

“Oh, damn it,” said Tony. “You couldn’t stay in the moment for just a little longer? What gave it away?”

“Your smile. I remember. You smiled the same way as you died.” Loki was a master of twisting dreamscapes, or had been before he began abandoning seidr. He knew better than to fight this dream. If it was a memory gone awry, he’d find the key to guiding and defusing it soon. If it was possession by another sorcerer, best to play the game for a little longer. This version of Tony Stark was too masterfully crafted down to feel and scent. 

“You don’t have to remember that,” said Tony, laying aside the flat, backlit tablet he’d been reading from. Loki heard it thunk into the leather couch cushion.

“I will never forget it.” Behind the words played Loki’s sorrow and shame, for never coming back to Midgardr even when every instinct had begged and screamed for it. “If I had come to you earlier, perhaps you need not have died.”

“Hey. Look at me, babe.” 

When Loki turned reluctantly, not trusting the illusion at such a close range, the sad, shy expression on Tony’s face nearly made him look away. The inventor’s warm hands caught the sides of Loki’s head, kept him there. This was no possession, no illusion, unless it was by someone who knew Tony Stark intimately: an older man, his hair a messy thatch of iron-gray, his lively face honed with age and experience. A lesser sorcerer might have tried tempting Loki with a far younger Stark. 

“I was human. I was dying in a few decades anyway, fifty-nine and healthy was a good age to kick off. The most important thing? You were there. You took all the fucking pain away, and you gave me time to say goodbye. You went and did my job for me, and gave me a helluva sendoff. I’m fairly sure my funeral was epic.”

“You are not real. You are just a ghost.”

“I’m a memory, babe. You looked inside my head, and I let you see as many of my memories as I could, while I still had time. Since you were such an asshole you wouldn’t stop back by for that drink I owed you.”

Loki offered the first excuse he could think of. “I was blue. I didn’t think you’d want –”

“You’re blue right now. I like it. You’re gorgeous, no matter what shape you take. It really wouldn’t have mattered.”

“And I was cold.”

“Yeah, I get it. Frost Giant. Still wouldn’t have mattered, between a sorcerer and an engineer. I’ll tell you about superconductors sometime – oh, wait, I don’t have to. Because you should know that already, from my memories.”

“Then why are you here?” The aching loss was almost balanced by the illusion of Tony warm and safe and alive beside him.

The man’s brown eyes narrowed. “Because I know your mind, too, sweetheart. I know you have a shelf on the wall above your bed. It’s for the most important things in your house. A really ugly little wooden horse Thor carved for you when you were kids. There’s a flower from Frigga, some kind of lily made from gold thread and amber beads. She taught you how to spin gold, didn’t she?”

“Stop,” Loki begged.

Iron Man was gentle and implacable. “There’s the faceplate to the armor I died in. And flanking it, two clear quartz vials sealed with cypress pitch and beeswax. The stuff inside one vial glows yellow as sunlight, with little white sparkles. The other is black, and lit with swirling red light. I know what they’re for, Loki.”

“Why should that matter to you?” Loki almost wailed, hating how it was his turn to sink into Tony’s embrace, and tuck his cold, sharp-edged face against the other man’s cotton-clad shoulder. 

“Why should I care if one of the loves of my life hurts so badly he made two poisons to choose from? The black one, that will send him lovely dreams, then coma, then death? Or the yellow one, to burn him inside-out in a slow week of agony? No, babe, I don’t want either of those for you.”

“Then what? I cannot go on like this!”

Tony’s hands stroked up along Loki’s scalp. “I know, I know. Believe me, I know. You could go to Earth. I hear the Avengers are a man down.”

“They would never accept me. I don’t – I don’t want to fight again. I don’t even want to work seidr.”

“Magic is your life, Loki.”

Against Tony’ collarbone, Loki said, “My life died days ago.”

“Fucking diva. You couldn’t have figured this out while I was alive?” 

Loki heard the resigned smile in Tony’s voice. “I do things the hard way, apparently.”

“Hmmm. You do, at that. I’ve reconsidered. I don’t want you out fighting and getting into trouble, either. Can you at least try to sleep here for a few centuries? Just close your eyes and let go, without going all the way?”

“Why?” Loki pulled away from Tony’s shoulder, Tony’s arms.

“Because, you big blue idiot, if you die now I might not find my way back to you. One of us has to remain a fixed point. And suicide is a fucking waste of immortality if I’ve ever heard one. But if you just go to sleep and stay here – maybe I can find you again.”

“You’re dead, Tony.”

That earned Loki a flash of the old Stark grin, smug, spectacular, and stunningly beautiful. A kindred soul standing against every voice that said ‘no’. “Yeah, about that,” purred Tony Stark. “If I know me, we’ll see how long that lasts. “

Loki glared at him, remembering sorcerers who made terrible mistakes on that same path. “Don’t you dare come back as a draugr. I’m not sure I could bear having to kill you.”

“Not into zombies, sorry. I was thinking: alive, preferably humanoid, hopefully magical and brilliant so I can keep up with you better. Beyond that, I’ll take what the universe offers. I figure it owes us one or two. Now. Are you going to sit there gaping like a fish, or are you coming back over here where you belong?”

Loki sagged back against convincingly human warmth. “Tony, you wouldn’t be so sure about this, if you hadn’t already been thinking about it. What did you do?”

“There was this amazing writer named Banks, made up a whole space opera universe me and Jarvis would have emigrated to in a shot. Banks had this mind-state scanning technology that could read and write personalities into new physical matrixes. And I got to thinking, about four weeks before That Battle, hey, I’m probably the smartest human on Earth, I should be able to figure out something like that…”

“You caught your soul?”

“Copied it. Sort of. I think. The important parts, at least. But I’ll need my fixed-point beacon, too.” Tony poked him in the ribs, and Loki laughed, and the laughter followed him down into happier dreams.

#

When Loki Silvertongue woke later, he reached up to the shelf over his bed. He held the toy horse and the golden lily to his chest. Breathed a kiss into the golden mask’s forehead. Scooped up the black vial and the yellow, staring at them for long, silent minutes. Then, because they were too deadly to leave on Jotunheimr, he banished them deep into a Muspell lava-pit. He accepted the momentary ache as their seidr, part of his, was destroyed in clean fire.

He set his long black hair into a single braid, shook out his white spellcoat, and gathered up the sleepy, protesting spear that had lain by his side for too many bitter days. “Hush,” he told it. “The time for breaking you is long past.” Its matte-black metal thrummed eagerly, then turned back to rich bronze under his blue fingers. 

He sealed his little house behind a spell-locked wall of ice, while thanking the black mountains for their hospitality. 

Then – because Tony Stark had first asked him to go, then forbidden him to go, and because there were far easier places for a reborn genius to find than a remote mountain valley in the Realm of Ice – Loki turned toward Midgardr, and Stark’s greatest Tower.

**Author's Note:**

> I had too many people (rightly) guess that this Loki had a more-or-less equal chance of suicide or death by neglect at the end of 'Empty House'. And enough of you asked for a better way. And then I remembered the late, great, and deeply-mourned Iain Banks, space opera writer grand-master.
> 
> Go look up his 'Culture' novels, and tell me Tony and Jarvis wouldn't emigrate in a sneeze.


End file.
